Sweeney's Nature

Joe Sweeney has an artist's statement on his website so that people will know what moves him but a picture is worth a thousand words. His pastels and oils reflect what remain of a world unspoiled—or treated gently, at any rate. "I've been watching the the landscape of America change for close to 30 years." he says, "and I'm concerned about the direction of that change. I'm painting what's left before it's gone."

And he does it extremely well. One New York Times reviewer called the quality of his pastel rendering "as smooth as Bassett's ice cream."

Sweeney started out with oil pastels but he didn't like the way they moved on paper, so he switched to dry, or soft, pastes. It's the medium he prefers; he uses oils to keep from getting into a single-medium rut. But waiting for things to dry is something he can't afford. Working outdoors, he says, "you have to move fast. You only get a couple of hours before the light changes everything—the colors, the shadows."

Sweeney sees specific themes running through his work: the sense of place; the figure in the landscape; man's relationship with nature, and the balance between nature and society. Not surprisingly, his favorite haunts are not urban, but places like Pennsylvania farmland, Delaware's shores, the Schuykill River Valley, southern New Jersey and the New York harbor.

Sweeney is a faculty member of the Professional Institute for Educators, which presents Continuing Inspiration and the painting program in Lewes, Delaware, which Sweeney leads.

His UArts students are predominantly teachers who receive credits for their time with him, but "know what they're supposed to be doing. What they like about working with me," he sys modestly, "is having a full day to just paint."

What Sweeney himself paints is a world that looks pretty much like it used to, where air and skies and rivers were clean and where nature was unendangered. The experienced observer," Sweeney says, "can determine the health of a place and its people by looking at the condition of the land they inhabit. It's with these things in mind that I approach a landscape."

The results, like those above, are representative of the contents of Sweeney's one-man show in New York, Baltimore, Washington, and Philadelphia: They speak for themselves.